"The Axios Show": Hasan Piker wants to campaign for AOC in 2028

"The Axios Show": Hasan Piker wants to campaign for AOC in 2028

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3 hours ago - Politics & Policy

"The Axios Show": Hasan Piker wants to campaign for AOC in 2028

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Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker said he "absolutely" wants to campaign for New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if she runs for president in 2028 and said he has talked with AOC and her team, he said in the new episode of "The Axios Show."

**Why it matters:** Piker, who has millions of followers online, has been a high-profile campaign surrogate this year for a new generation of left-wing candidates, and wants to do the same in 2028.

**Driving the news:** Despite Piker's ambitions, some Democratic politicians have begun distancing themselves from him because of his controversial commentary.

* Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan's Democratic nominee for the Senate, campaigned with Piker during the Senate primary.
* But after Piker told Axios that he believed America's long history of attacks in the Middle East that have killed civilians made it worse than al-Qaeda "pound for pound," El-Sayed said he disagreed and that Piker didn't speak for his campaign.
* El-Sayed has said Piker won't appear with him in the final weeks of the race before the Nov. 3 election.

**In an hour-long interview with Axios,** Piker explained his worldview and defended his stances that some Democrats are distancing themselves from:

**China:** Piker traveled to China last year and has said that the country is the closest government model he would like to see adopted in the U.S.

* He also thinks that "trajectory-wise, I worry that a Chinese child might have better conditions in the next decade or next two decades than an American one. And I think that should worry every American citizen."

**Asked about his past praise** of Mao Zedong, Piker said "he's a great man of history. Of course, there were a lot of excesses."

* When asked to clarify what he meant as "excesses," Piker said: "Deaths borne out of mismanagement and famine."

**Political violence:** Axios asked Piker about several of his past statements about killing or harming political opponents, and he said they amounted to "three or four choice quotes."

* He said he consistently says that the "appropriate way to deal with political problems, even violent ones, is to advocate, organize, and create a response that is borne out of labor militancy, work stoppages and the like, to apply political pressure that way."
* Talking with a friend on his stream, Piker once said of landlords who don't rent their properties: "Kill those motherf\*ckers and murder those motherf\*ckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their f\*cking red capitalist blood, dude."
* He told Axios that "we were messing around. It wasn't a serious call to violence."

**Piker — a frequent and aggressive critic** of Israel's government— said he believes "Zionism is fascism" and that it was equivalent to neo-Nazism.

* Asked about the potential danger of his rhetoric, Piker said: "I'm not worried that \[my followers are] going to be violent against Zionists. No, I'm not."

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